That’s a Wrap! Lessons from the Volaris Academy

Last month we held our annual Volaris Academies – one in Flims, Switzerland and the other in Orlando, Florida. What is the Volaris Academy? It’s a multi-day conference where we bring together our senior leaders and high performers to share best practices, learn new approaches, and collaborate and network with their colleagues across the globe. This year the Academies had two different focuses: core performance or organic and acquired growth.

At Volaris, we believe that before a business unit can focus on making investments in organic or acquired growth, they must first have a strong core business and ensure that they have efficient operations that are delivering their existing customers value. Once strong business processes are in place, then they can start investing in new initiatives in order to increase organic growth, or look at acquiring other companies.

These Academies are a big undertaking to put on, but they are always worth the effort and planning that goes into them. Now that we’ve had time to recover and reflect, below are some of the key lessons learned from this year’s Academies.

#1 Make Fundamental Changes

When it comes to optimizing your core business  and improving your operations, sometimes it is not enough to make small changes. Instead, drastic changes need to be implemented in order to increase the long-term sustainability of your business. It might seem risky to implement big alterations, but minor adjustments will not fix the root cause of the problem and will only improve things for the short term.

#2 Consider Splitting Your Business

Especially in the B2B market, often companies spend much of their time servicing large customers that they don’t give their small and medium size customers the service level that they deserve or sometimes the opposite is also true. If that is the case for your business, consider splitting the company into two – one half focuses on the large accounts and the other focuses on the small and medium sized accounts. We recently did that with two of our business units and created two new companies: TripSpark Technologies and InTempo Software.

#3 Everyone Can Do Their Part

No matter what challenges or opportunities your company faces, everyone is responsible for the success of the business. Each unit can do their part to ensure that the firm runs smoothly and continues to grow - whether it’s developing new initiatives, coming up with a new cost saving measure, or implementing more efficient processes. The success of our various business units is not just up to our unit leaders but falls on everyone’s shoulders.

Concluding Thoughts

Having a culture of collaboration is extremely important to us, which is one of the reasons why we hold these yearly Academies. Not only do our employees get to network with their colleagues from across the globe, but they also learn best practices from each other, and collaborate with one another. That along with the three lessons listed above is why we keep doing this year after year.